MethHunter: Find, Fix And Incarcerate! (DagirCo)

Want to cut your town's meth problem in half next year? You can. Really.

The guys over at Dagirco have finally done it! MethHunter is on the streets and check out these early stats: One of our small, local police departments is using it and they have had over a dozen busts and over a half dozen convictions in the last six months. The best part? The program has cut the time it takes to conduct an investigation in half!

One of local TV stations (WICU) recently did a five part special series on meth in NW Pennsylvania in general and on the MethHunter in particular. The video below is only one part of the five part series. The other four parts can be accessed at the end of this video:



I am particularly proud to say I know the team at DagirCo that put this piece of software together. Most of them, including Mark Blair, the CEO, are Mercyhurst grads and I have had the great good fortune to have many of them in class over the years.

Beyond this, though, I am particularly impressed with the way they tackled the problem. They have essentially created an expert system that looks at pill shopping patterns and "thinks" about them the same way a meth expert might think about them. It automates, as Mark puts it in one of the videos, the "80% of the tedious, time-consuming" work of analyzing purchase records. It even examines the shopping patterns for evidence of denial and deception on the part of the pill shoppers!

It is easy for you to imagine this all getting very technical and difficult to interpret. That is where this program really shines. The DagirCo team has worked particularly hard to make the program user friendly for small town and rural police forces. Their thinking was that large cities often have dedicated meth experts but that small and rural police forces may not have the resources for such a position. This meant that the program had to produce something that was understandable and actionable by a police officer who had received no special training.

It turns out that the straightforward, cop-friendly way the program generates output benefits both small and large police forces. It gives the smaller police force a capability where it had none before and it saves the experts in the larger forces time that can be better spent looking at aspects of the meth problem that the software cannot address.

The DagirCo team is also particulaly proud of the "engine" they developed to drive the MethHunter. They think it can be used in a broad range of applications. Currently, they are thinking about how it might be applied to other problem drugs and even other crimes in general (they are working on an anti-graffitti version right now). Mark, a former marine, also believes a modified version of this software could be useful in analyzing insurgent attack patterns in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Japanese Space Elevators, Terrorism In The Phillipines And Graffiti (Catching Up)

I love teaching strategic intelligence but it does take it out of me. The centerpiece of the class is a series of small group projects for real world decisionmakers on a variety of business, law enforcement or national security topics. In the past, we have done projects, for example, for the NIC, the 66th MI and the Army War College on topics ranging from bioterror preparedness in Europe to the role of non-state actors in sub-saharan Africa.

This last term (we are on the quarter system at Mercyhurst so we are just winding up our fall term) was no exception. I had good solid projects from decisionmakers that wanted and needed the results coupled with teams of hard-working, dedicated student analysts to get things done. 10 teams to be exact. For those of you keeping score at home, that is technically known as "a ton of strategic intelligence projects".

Anyway, Strategic (as it is fondly -- maybe? -- called by the students) kept me from blogging about all of the other interesting stuff that has been happening lately as well. I will try to catch up next week, but here are some recent highlights.

Cyndi Lee, a current grad student, recently had an article published by ISN talking about the prospects for a Japanese space elevator. Once thought to be just science fiction, Cyndi's research suggests that the technology is either here, right now, or within reach and that the Japanese are serious about trying to make it happen.

I may have mentioned this before but my long-time writing partner, Diane Chido, also had a piece published by ISN on the "exportability" of the model used in the Phillipines to reduce the threat posed by Abu Sayyaf. If you missed it (or I forgot to mention it), it is worth your time.

Diane has also recently established herself as a freelance intelligence analyst and launched the company DC Analytics. I am prejudiced, of course, but if you have read her thesis or any of her other articles on ISN or her books or her essays in Competitive Intelligence Magazine, you know she is a talented professional with all the right credentials to go "indie". She joins Mark Blair and Mike Thomas of Dagir Co. as Mercyhurst grads who have become intelligence entrepreneurs.

Finally, one of the strategic teams mentioned earlier, working for the Erie Graffiti Task Force, has really been making a spash locally. The Task Force is an ad hoc group of local business owners, politicians and academics trying to constructively tackle the issue of graffiti. With the limited resources they have at their disposal, they really needed strategic intelligence to help inform their strategy. The project turned out very well and was extremely well-received by not only the Task Force, but also by the Mayor of Erie, Joe Sinnott, who sat in on the final brief.